That the Committee invite the Chair of the Working Group of Ministers on Achieving Steady State for the Pay System to provide a briefing to the Committee on the working group’s progress; That the meeting be held outside of the Committee’s regular schedule if necessary;

I say this in the spirit of co-operation: if the member opposite would deem it to be a friendly amendment, I have every expectation that within the time frame envisaged, the minister will be making an appearance at the committee and addressing that very topic.

If the member considers that a friendly amendment, I offer it up. If not, then I leave it in your hands, Mr. Chair.

I would like to begin by noting that the fair wages policy applied to the hiring of workers within Canada. We don't know what a modernized fair wages policy would look like, but I don't see any reason to assume that it would violate international trade agreements.

With the panel, I do want to return to the question I left off on about the latitude that we have with provincial or local procurement.

For the first part of your question, that's correct. It is at the sub-federal level, and that's why they can do that and exclude us from those procurements.

Under the Canada-E.U. trade agreement, CETA, we did cover the sub-federal level. As long as it is a covered procurement—if the type of goods or service is covered and it is within the threshold—then it is covered, and we would not be able to have a buy Canadian policy. However, there are a number of sectors, so if you are, again, under the threshold that I mentioned earlier, the $220,000 threshold, or in any of the excluded areas that I mentioned earlier—health and other public services, research development, shipbuilding, culture, financial services, sporting services, recreational services, etc.—then we could have a buy Canadian policy if we so desired at the sub-federal level.

I would simply add to what my colleague has stated that it's not only the CETA. The WTO agreement on government procurement also provides sub-federal entity coverage as well. We would have to be mindful of both trade agreements and obligations therein. Similar types of rules would apply.

The United States has covered some of their states in the WTO GPA, 37 states; however, there are a lot of exclusions that apply to those states. They are able to administer the Buy American program, which is a federally instituted policy that applies to transfer payments from the federal government to state or municipal governments. As a condition of receiving those federal funds, they must do Buy America in terms of buying American things. It depends on the types of procurements that are being carried out. If they are infrastructure projects, it has to be American steel, for example.

They are able to do this within their trade agreements because even the GPA includes a lot of exceptions, including for construction-grade steel. These are exceptions that would have been taken by the various states. Not every state has an exception for construction grade steel, but many do. Most do.